One of my fellow Los Angeles Poker Bloggers, StudioGlyphic (who won the WPBT Winter Classic last December) is looking for some help for one of his friends, whose girlfriend is very sick with cancer, and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. The odds of finding a donor match are about 1:20,000, but this girl’s odds are even longer because she is Fillipino:

Medically, the only option Christine has left is a Bone Marrow
Transplant. The survival rate of this procedure is 30-40%. Of those who
do survive the procedure itself, only 50% survive the next two years.
However, if she does survive those two years, it means the cancer won’t
come back.

This is a pretty terrible option. However, the non medical option is
also horrible. Her doctor says that if she chooses not to have the Bone
Marrow Transplant, she’ll be dead within a year.

This is hard enough for the average person. There
are over 20,000 types of bone marrow, so the average person has a 1 in
20,000 chance of finding a match. These numbers are even worse for
Christine. Because she is Filipino, she needs to find a donor of the
same ethnic background, and there are hardly any Filipinos on the
National Registry.

Because we caught the cancer early, right now is our best chance of
having the Bone Marrow Transplant work. Every day we lose her chances
of surviving drop.

So please, contact your friends, and ask them to contact their
friends. Anyone you know who is Filipino and between the ages of 18 and
61 is a potential donor. The system is nationwide, so it doesn’t matter
where they live. Signing up on the registry is easy and painless. All
it requires is a simple blood test. Some hospitals charge a small fee
for this blood test, however if your friends contact me directly, I can
put them in touch with one of the hundreds of local organizations that
will do the blood test for free. They can use this email address:

[email protected]

You can reassure your friends that signing up for the registry does
not require donating any bone marrow. If it turns out they are a match,
they will be contacted, and can make the decision at that point about
becoming a donor.

There are lots of misconceptions about donating bone marrow. (I know
I was terrified of doing it before I learned how minor the procedure
actually is.) The procedure is simple and safe. You will be
anesthetized the whole time, so you will not feel anything. When the
procedure is over, you may have some soreness in the area for a few
days and you may feel a little tired. That’s it. The bone marrow you
donate is replenished within 3-4 weeks. And again, you will only
undergo this procedure if your blood sample shows that you are a match
and you decide to donate, in which case the slight soreness you’ll be
feeling will be saving someone’s life.

All medical expenses for the donor will be covered by Christine’s
insurance. And as I mentioned before, if they contact me directly, I
can put them in touch with an organization near them that will put them
on the National Registry for free and also make sure they are listed as
a Sponsor for Christine.

Even if you aren’t a match yourself, and even if you can’t personally help Christine, please link to this post, and spread the word around. I know there are about a million of you who read this lame blog every month, and if just half of you make some effort to spread the word around, we may be able to help save Christine’s life.

Unless I crash into something that makes me think, "OMG I HAVE TO BLOG THIS RIGHT NOW KTHXBYELOLORZ," I find that it’s much easier for me to write in the very early morning, or very late at night. Sitting down here in the middle of the day is a little weird, and I don’t quite know where I’m going to go. (I guess this thought process is not exactly the sort of thing one writes down when attempting to engage an audience, huh?)

Ah! I know where I’ll start!

To continue this week’s, uh, theme: why am I pushing myself to write for at least ten minutes a day?

Because I’ve done so much writing lately that isn’t really story-telling, those muscles have atrophied quite a bit. Because somedays there just isn’t anything obviously worth writing about, and on those days I have to dig a little deeper for something that’s at least moderately interesting to me. Because it’s easier for me to write when I fell happy than when I feel sad, and blogging every single day has the bonus side effect of making me seek out and focus on happier things. I find that I appreciate things much more, and that I’m more observant of the things around me, because I’m always on the look out for something cool to write about.

A friend of mine who is a hell of a writer once told me that being a writer can make otherwise emotional and sensitive people become detached and distant, because we’re so busy observing things, we forget to experience them. After this week, I totally grok that. On the one hand, it’s important to always have my senses as open as possible, but at the same time, I can’t lose the forest for the trees.

Okay, navel-gazing over.

Last night, my friend Kevin came over to have dinner with us. Kevin and I have been really good friends for over a decade, but as we’ve grown older and our various commitments have grown larger, we have had less and less time to hang out. In fact, before last night, I hadn’t seen Kevin in over three years, which meant I hadn’t met his girlfriend (we love her, by the way), who he decided to bring with him at just about the last minute, turning our "let’s get together with Kevin" dinner into a "oh my god we’re having a new person into the house quick get the vaccuum and I’ll clean the bathroom" experience.

It was totally worth it. Not only did we get a nice clean house in forty-five minutes, we had a really great time, and it was quite amusing to watch my two teenaged boys deal with the presense of a very pretty 20-something girl in their house.

After dinner, I played in the WWdN Thursday night game at PokerStars (where I busted out early because I made the mistake of getting my money in as a dominating favorite) while Anne and the kids watched CSI. The kids went to sleep around ten, and Anne stayed to watch Without A Trace, so I grabbed The Dark Tower, which I’ve been close to finishing for several days now, and settled into the couch to finish it.

You know, one of my strongest criticisms of Stephen King is that he just can’t end a story, and the closer I got to the final page of this one, the more knotted my stomach became. I’ve invested at least fifteen years in this series, and I was really worried that I was going to feel the way I felt when I finished It. I won’t get into specifics, because publishing spoilers totally fucking sucks, but I can honestly say that I was not disappointed with the way The Dark Tower finally ended, and I appreciated Stephen King’s honesty about it in the afterword very much. It’s far from perfect, especially what would be the last two reels if it was a movie, but it was still a satisfying finish for me, and I felt like all the characters I’d grown to care so much about were given the appropriate resolutions.

How’s that for muddled?

Speakng of caring about characters, Nolan has been absolutely glued to this book called Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson. As a writer, parent, and book-lover, I can tell you that there are few things as wonderful as seeing him turn off the TV and walk away from Xbox so he can read this book. Last night, he came up to me with a pale face, and red eyes and said, in a quivering voice, "My book just got really sad. A boy I cared a lot about died."

He could have been telling me about the loss of a friend. I felt like I should hug him.

"I totally understand," I said, and pointed to my copy of The Dark Tower, "One of my favorite characters in this book died about two hundred pages ago, and I felt like I’d lost a friend."

"It’s weird how a book can make you feel that way," he said.

"I think it’s really wonderful that you are sensitive and intelligent enough to let a writer affect you like that, Nolan," I said, "that makes me feel really good as a writer and as a parent."

"You should totally read this book, Wil," he said, "and Speak, too. You’d really like them."

"Okay," I said, "your recommendation means a lot to me. I’ll put them into my pile."

He ran into his room, and came out with Speak. He handed it to me, and I saw what a beautiful forest I was in. I marveled at every single tree.

I run these weekly tourneys at PokerStars, at 5:30 PST on Tuesday and 8:30 PST on Thursday.

These games are filled with a really cool mix of players from hee-haw (me) to HAWESOME (GRob) and everywhere in between (Pauly, CJ, PokerGeek, Heather), but there aren’t that many players from the other side of the pond, because the game just starts too damn late for them.

Tomorrow, I’ve cleared a couple of hours in the middle of my morning, so I can host a game specifically designed to be Eurofriendly. In fact, it’s called WWdN: Eurofriendly Friday.

If you’re interested in playing, head over to PokerStars, and from the lobby go to tourneys -> private, and look for tourney number 19345283. The buy-in is $10 +1, and the game starts at 1:30 PM EST (5:30 PM GMT) which should make it "friendly" for the bulk of European players.

Last week, I spoke with Michael and Evo for their Slice of Sci-Fi podcast. Our interview is around twenty minutes or so, I guess, and is included in Episode #43.

I dig their podcast, and I especially dig how they’ve built the website for Slice of Sci-Fi. I think I’m going to steal take a lot of inspiration from their design when I make Radio Free Burrito a real, once-a-week, I’m-serious-about-this-after-all podcast.

This morning, my ten-minutes-a-day thing is kind of a challenge, because there’s really nothing to write about. Honestly. Nothing has happened since yesterday that I can make even remotely interesting.

I thought about joking, thusly:

So long, suckers!

I sat down to check e-mail this morning, and discovered that I hit the trifecta: I won a lottery in New Zealand, another one in Nigeria, and got an offer to become the legal guardian for some Irish billionaire who’ll give me a whole bunch of money just for showing up.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be under a pile of money.

But that’s cheap and too easy, and I wasn’t really willing to go all the way with it and tell you about how I’m going to have the biggest penis in the universe that’s built for maximum loving, daring . . .  so I’ll see if I can dig anything else interesting out of my skull.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Nope. Nothing.

OH! I know. I’m quite proud of this week’s Games of our Lives, which is a game called Astro Fighter. I wish you’d all go over to the AV Club to read it. Thankyouverymuch.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day writing next week’s Games of our Lives, as well as a review of a new game (I probably shouldn’t discuss specifics right now) but it was really fun to pick a classic arcade game that dovetailed with the current console game I reviewed.

When I was done with that, I did a short training walk with Anne and the dogs. We’re nowhere near running, yet, but it still feels great to get out and walk every single day.

OH! This is cool: Anne, the kids, and I are going to run in the 10th Annual Race For the Cure at the Rosebowl on February 26th. We did it last year, and it was Hawesome. We’re not going to do any fundraising for this race, but we will be fundraising for the RnR Marathon later this year. I am planning some REALLY cool fundraising events, and I’ve even convinced Anne to write in a special blog that we’re building just for that.

Of course, if any of you reading this are interested in contributing $5 or $10 for the Race for the Cure, I bet we could raise a few hundred dollars for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you’re interested, send me an e-mail or mention it in comments, and we’ll figure out a way to take your donation. In fact, now that I think about it, it would be Hawesome (and probably pretty easy) to raise at least $500 in tiny donations, if the stats about people who read my blog are true.

Okay, so this entry isn’t entirely lame, and at least I’ve stayed on target for writing something every morning. That’s helping wake up the part of my creative monkey that needs to be jumping around my head to finish the book.